At school and while listening to a lecture, I am wondering what time it is or what type of news a certain website has to offer me, so I decide to check my smartphone for the news and since I have the phone in my hand, I might as well check for text-messages. This is quicker done than said; grabbing the phone out of my pocket is a matter of seconds and the discomfort of people around me getting irritated by the sounds I make are minimised.
A couple of seats in front of me, I see an other student grabbing something else. Something big. but It's not really a laptop or something, because it's just too flat for something like that. With unhandy movements and accidentally touching a student next to him, he finally has the device laying on his table. It's a tablet, an iPad to be exact. Curious about the reason why someone would need that, I sneakily watch the contents being shown on the tablet. But at the point when I try to focus on the tablet, the student already puts it back in his pocket. It seems that he had a similar goal as I did for grabbing my phone: just checking the contents of a website or checking his social status on a network or messenger-based platform. Why just not buy a smartphone if it has the same functionality as a tablet?

Nowadays, tons of different mobile devices are added to the market everyday and the functionalities of those devices are overlapping. For me, the main groups of mobile products are the notebooks, netbooks, tablets and mobile phones. The tablet and mobile phones (especially the smartphones) are known to have touchscreen capabilities and have many functionalities in common, such as browsing trough the Internet, calling, text-messaging and playing basic videogames. The two major differences between these devices are the size and the pricetag. Tablet have a 7" or a 10" screen, while the size of smartphone can vary between a small 1,5" screen to a relativly large 4" screen, like the one of the Samsung Galaxy S. For smartphone, the prices can go up to 500 euros, while the most expensive tablet can cost little below 1000 euros.

So, why do people choose for these big, bulky tablets while there aren't much functional and technological advantages over the smartphones? I think that a very important reason why people buy tablet are, especially with the iPad, is boasting the self-image. Like buying a Macbook Pro instead of a 'normal' laptop dispite the fact that it costs twice as much, people like buying an iPad because it attracts attention from people around them. Of course, when people are used to the new operation systems of Apple, they can lean on that reason for having the product. But when you don't have an idea of whether you will like the product itself, you have to trust the company or people around you that bought the same product. And appearenty, Apple does this job quite well, having sold over 10 million iPads.

At the moment, I'm inclined to believe that the image of buying a tablet surpassed the need for a functional tablet, because a smartphone will suit that need. This is about to change, because more types of tablets are released, providing a broader price range and technical specifications for the consumers. The new operating system Andriod is rising on mobile platform and this will be the case for tablets as well. Although Apple will maintain the leading position of tablets for some time, the diversity of Andriod will broaden the market for consumers who are not tempted by corporate images and are more looking for functionality as well. Not that I'm saying that Apple doesn't provide that (oh well, maybe I'm saying that a little bit), but the market should be more diveded, that's all.